-, "I' 74 LETTER FROM EUROPE PARIS, JULY 19 T HIS is the season of a Paris ritual called les grands déParts. Neighborhoods empty over- night. Stores close with funereal cere- mony. Léon Blum's congé payé has given way to François Mitterrand's five weeks with pay for every French family-which, with a little fiddling, a little arranging, turn easily into six. Parisians now spend the first half of July eating their way through expen- sive and emotional farewell lunches and farewell dinners with people whom in all likelihood they have not considered with such desperate affec- tion since the last départs. They spend the second half of July leaving town. My butcher and his wife left the other day for the Auvergne after a feast at the best restaurant on the street. They reserved a sidewalk table, and all the neighbors saw them, scrubbed and chubby, and saw their new shoes and their new haircuts, and were thus informed that for the next month or so it would be lamb chops from the Bon Marché or pasta. The old cou- ple who run the poissonerie left for their cottage in the Finistère, near the ocean and the familiar fishy smells of ocean air. The proprietor of the hard ware store on the corner locked his door and rolled up his awning and stood outside receiving customers, shaking hands, sending his anxious respects to everybody's parents and grandparents and maiden aunts in the provinces. Mme. Gonçalves, my concierge, left for Portugal. A FEW weeks ago, I was in Por- tugal. The country seemed sleepy again, almost the way it had before April 25, 1974-which was the day more than a hundred and fifty thou- sand soldiers and sailors, sick at heart from thirteen years of colonial war in Africa, put carnations in their rifles and quietly took over Portugal and its dissolving empire to the refrain of a beautiful Resistance ballad called "Grândola," played on the state radio. April 25th was a friendly and courte- ous revolution, and for a time it in- spired a friendly and courteous sort of liberty. People in Lisbon never stopped talking. It was the first chance most of them had ever had to speak their minds or argue politics or make a speech without getting arrested. T 0- day, they are exhausted. They seem not so much to have regressed as to have settled back into the kind of daze that the Fascists who ran the country for nearly fifty years used to roman- ticize, at their convenience, as the radiant simplicity of 0 povo, the people of Portugal. The people in fact com- plain, saying that it is as if everything and nothing had changed since their revolution. The Portuguese have sur- vived the loss-in wealth and self-es- teem-of what was the last great colonial empire. They have pulled "Portugal" back into the same thin slice of Iberia it was in 1497, when Vasco da Gama sailed out from Lisbon looking for India. They have come through two attempted coups d'état (one from the right and one from the left ), seventeen failed governments, and eight years of economic catas- trophe with their new democracy more or less intact. But by now the effort of democracy seems to have worn them down nearly as much as the oppres- sions of António de Oliveira Salazar wore them down during his thirty-six years as the dour impresario of Por- tuguese Fascism. They are still talk- ing all the time, in their villages and their factories and their party club- houses. At two in the morning, chic little Lisbon bars like the Procopio and the Snob are still full of people argu- ing. The trouble is that their conver- sation is the same conversation, and they are bored with it by now. This spring, a kind of "people's party" composed almost entirely of well-heeled Lisbon intellectuals with liberal foreign educations threw a big dinner, and all the intellectuals for- mally, tearfully, parted company. In 1974, the Movimento da Esquerda Socialista, as the group was called, was the center of conversation in Lisbon. Now, for the people who used to spend their time at MES, the fun is over . For some of them, the fine promise of April 25th is over, too. Foreigners no- tice things like this: The graffiti are fading in Lisbon. The flower venders who used to hawk the red carnations of April 25th are hawking clay pots of basil in honor of São Antonio, the pa- tron saint of the city. The blind beg- . . . . . . . . . . . . . AUGUST 2,1982 gar who spent the first year of the revolution on the A venida da Liber- dade crying "Help me, help me! I am the last unhappiness in Portugal!" has died of old age and a winter cough, which was not much helped by the fact that so many of the country's doctors left for Rio and São Paulo that year. Mme. Goldstein, who turned a con- vent on the Rua das J anelas Verdes into a famous Lisbon pension called York House and in 1974 was house- mother to every important Portuguese dissident returning from exile, has "sold to the Arabs," or so people in Lisbon say. There are tourists at York House now instead of French televi- sion crews and visiting Brazilian revolutionaries and American univer- sity professors with a specialty in Marxist economics; honeymooners have replaced the spies whispering under the trees in Mme Goldstein's palmy courtyard. The young com- mandos who used to strut through town in their snappy camouflage, proud of themselves and their revolu- tion, have all gone home. The three young "captains" (two of them were actually majors) who planned the revolution of April 25th are getting on. The youngest of them, Vasco Lourenço, has put on weight and looks like one of those stocky wooden soldiers that Portuguese peas- ants carve in two pieces, front and back, and sell to tourists as paper- napkin holders. Lourenço had really wanted to be an insurance salesman, not a hero, as he confessed last spring, when the three captains got together at lunch for a newspaper interview. V Itor Alves, who is usually credited with having been the brains of April 25th, is restless and ambitious, and will probably go into politics once the mili- tary Council of the Revolution that was set up in 1975 to look after the in- terests of the revolution is dissolved this year, under a new Portuguese Constitution. The third "captain," Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho, has al- ready been in politics. He ran for Pres- ident of Portugal in 1976 and man- aged to get seventeen per cent of the vote even though he was under house arrest for encouraging an uprising of "workers, soldiers, and sailors"-a sort of populist revolution within the revolution-the year before and was forbidden to travel farther than ten kilometres from his house without special permission. Otelo, as he is always called, ran again in 1980. Irrepressible and kindly, he now sits in the offices of a new workers' party